AMD has announced a live ‘New Horizon’ event is set to take place in December. The event is hosted by Geoff Keighley and will be used to preview AMD’s upcoming Zen CPUs ahead of a the full launch in Q1 2017.

Evil Geniuses’ PPD will be putting Zen through its paces live, along with inviting special guests onstage to talk about AMD’s much anticipated new processor, and a host of giveaways.

The event itself is taking place two weeks from today, at 3PM CST / 9PM on December 12th. You can sign up now to hear the first information on where the livestream is going to be taking place.

As for Zen itself, we’re expecting a huge increase in performance over its previous Bulldozer series CPUs - as much as a 40% boost to IPC (instructions per cycle). Intel has been busy advancing its own CPUs in the year’s since though, so I wouldn’t go expecting anything drastically more powerful than its current line-up of Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs.

What will certainly be interesting however is the pricing strategy AMD takes. For too long now Intel has effectively had the gaming CPU market all to itself. With any luck this could spark a price war which is only ever going to be good for us, the gamers.

I hope Zen beats Kaby Lake and really starts to kick intel for their annoying tick tock refresh cycle which basically means a much slower progression than it was before. I just have to believe the world can change.

They also showed a sample of the new "SR7" 8C/16T Zen beating a Broadwell-E Core i7-6900K (albeit, an underclocked one) in a multi-threaded Blender workload a while back so im hoping ZEN will put the preassure on intel to cut their prices and focus on improving their CPUs not just a 5% boost every year